Today's internet user is likely to publish content on numerous websites without regard to the longevity, availability, or storage allowances on each site. For example, a content producing internet user is likely to have photographs published on Flickr, MySpace and Facebook and video on YouTube, Google Video, College Humor and similar sites. Most users keep copies of this type of published content on their local computers. However, users are faced with the daunting task of re-collecting all of their published work in the event of a local machine failure.
Simply backing-up this content is burdensome for a user because of the typically large size of multimedia files. Backing up the content to removable media (e.g., CD-ROMs) is not only slow but also expensive, due to the cost of the media. If the user backs-up the content to a remote computer, the slow upload speeds are further exacerbated by the fact that the user has to upload the same content to both the target publishing site and a backup site. It would therefore be desirable if all of a user's publishable content could be automatically aggregated to a single storage site for back-up purposes.
Additionally, in order to publish content on multiple sites, a user must keep repetitively logging-in to different sites, searching their machine for the files to publish and waiting for the content to upload. Thus, it would be further desirable if user content could be published from a single remote site rather than the user's local computer.